I'm writing this for those not fortunate enough to attend the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Audience X Science conference in New York City. You will want to pay attention, because one session in particular -- the ARF's Tracy Adams' and Paul Donato's review of Phase 3 of its attention measurement validation initiative -- is all about it. You can read my previous commentaries on Phase 1 and Phase 2, but this year's session, dubbed "Attention As Signal, Or Beyond," demonstrated how many in the industry are now using attention metrics to judge relative media …

Imagine consumers delegate shopping to agents. Businesses will no longer sell to humans. They'll be selling to smart technologies. No need to communicate with people. No need for marketing.

*"The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge do not reflect Nielsen's currency TV ratings."

According to some who should know, it's happening right now. If you don't believe me, listen to Laura Desmond, David Kenny, Bill Koenigsberg and Matt Seiler explain why.

That was the question that closed Tuesday's MediaPost upfront panel discussion, but the bigger question throughout might well have been "What's an upfront?"

Attention is no longer the gatekeeper. For two decades, digital marketing has been engineered around one dominant design: the ad unit. Paid search. Pre-roll. Display. We optimized bids, refined audiences, and scaled reach with precision. Marketing became a predictable, capital-efficient growth engine. That engine still works, but the interface that governs decision-making is changing, and that changes what drives performance. Marketing is shifting from a system optimized to win attention to one optimized to win recommendation. As AI increasingly shapes what consumers see and choose, competitive advantage depends less on distribution scale alone, and …

The Advertising Research Foundation's CIMM East Conference began where last year's left off: on an advertising "currency fiesta," per Fox Senior Vice President-Research & Data, Ad Sales' Kym Frank, who famously made that quip in 2025.

Just when it seems like the ad industry has been getting a grip on some forms of ad fraud, an analysis of 2025 performance ad spending finds that AI is optimizing -- er, I mean exacerbating -- it.

"We made a pretty big shift a few years ago when we moved almost all of our media planning analysis - and in some cases buying - in-house, because we needed to be more agile."

You're probably familiar with Paul Parton's name from the byline that appears on some of the best columns published here. This column is about where it appears next: his just-published, "Share Of Culture."